Does Cato’s New Objectivist CEO John Allison Presage Retrogression on IP?

byStephan KinsellaonAugust 27, 2012

Intellectual Property (primarily: patent and copyright; but also others, like trademark) has become one of the most significant state threats to liberty in our time. My estimate it’s now in the top 5 or 6 among the most evil and destructive statist laws and policies.1 It drains hundreds of billions of dollars worth of productivity and innovation from the US economy alone each year.2

And thankfully, since the Internet’s rise to prominence in the mid-90s, and the increasing threat IP poses to Internet freedom, libertarians have been waking up. They are increasingly for the abolition of IP, especially among anarchists and Austrians.3 Utilitarian libertarians are being pulled along too by the overwhelming empirical evidence of harm done by IP.

One stubborn IP holdout are the Objectivists, since Rand geared so much of her moral and property theory around this idea, going so far as to (ludicrously) claim that “Patents are the heart and core of property rights.”4 And though an increasing number of Objectivists are deviating from Rand’s pro-IP5 and pro-government script, most of them are still strongly for IP.

The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) is dedicated to building public awareness of the manner in which laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose laws that systematically impede or hamper innovation, especially those enforced in the name of defending “intellectual property,” such as patent and copyright; these should be radically reformed or entirely abolished.

We provide news commentary and analysis and scholarly resources from our unique pro-property, pro-market, pro-innovation perspective. The Center is the publisher of the online scholarly journal Libertarian Papers.